Weblog » Archives » November 2003

  • Dear Novelist, It is our supreme pleasure to inform you that our internationally renowned team of word-counting robots have completed their judicious assessment of your manuscript, and have passed on th…

  • Less than a thousand to go. I should be done before noon.

  • 8,888 I'm moving to the couch to try to get a few more words in before I fall asleep. It looks like I will make it for sure, as I am at 45,014. My goal for the day was to get to 45K so I feel really good about that. St…

  • 44,000.

  • 43,000.

  • 42,000.

  • 41,000

  • Just broke 40,000. Still going. I think I'm gonna make it. It's a miracle.

  • Updated word count on the left. I'm at 36,849 and there are only two days to go. I'm going to have to really knuckle down to have any hope of making it. I still think I can do it, ridiculous as that sounds. Hope everyon…

  • Bush mispronounces Nevada in visit Nov. 28, 2003 | CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) -- Nevada memo to George Bush: When making a first presidential visit to a state, use the right pronounciation of its name. Bush, in Las Ve…

  • Well, the big feast is over. I don't know when grocery stores started being open on Thanksgiving Day. I remember when I was in college, on my way to someone's parents' every year for Thanksgiving, and stopping off a…

  • 2,052 I'm going to bed now.

  • Travelblogue, Part TwoJune 1984 Photos later, maybe. I'm missing a lot of them, especially of the kids. The Air Florida jet we're taking from Miami to Port-Au-Prince is the reason tranquilizers were invented. Unfortuna…

  • 1,722 I'm determined to get to 50K by the end of the month. Good thing I have a four-day weekend coming up. Thanks for all your comments on yesterday's Travelblogue. I'll get Part 2 up as soon as I can. Oh, here's my …

  • Travelblogue, Part One June 1984 I've spent the night at Polly's, and she, Joey and I get up early to make the trip to the airport in San Francisco. Our friend Tom, who loves to drive, will be taking us. It's around 5 …

  • ***Updated 11/24/03 to add photo. It's a weird picture because it looks like she has a stump tail, which she doesn't (not that there's anything wrong with that). The white mark by her right shoulder is a scratch on the p…

  • Quick post RE Superset Tennis: I don't like the one-set format. I thought it would be exciting, but there's not enough time for the crowd to get into the match before it's over. The luxury box was way cool, thou…

  • Check out these excellent blogs by davidjdotorg and TooOldForThis. Post like these are why I like Xanga so much. Got up early this morning to work on NaNoWriMo. I'm going to Superset tennis in a couple of hours. I real…

  • 1,005 Pathetic word count, eh? I actually wrote quite a long piece today but it wasn't for my novel. I think I'll be able to get caught up and finish on time. I'll have my dog walk article turned in before Thanks…

  • I went for a walk at lunch and I'm feeling better. Thanks for your comments. Damn, my hair looks good today. It's cold out, but there's no snow, even though they had predicted some for today. Probably just covering thei…

  • I've been sitting here all morning wondering how I came to have a black belt in bad judgment, and if there's some kind of Guinness record for Most Consecutive Bad Decisions by a Pretty Smart Person With Generally Good …

  • So about an hour ago I was going to make my customary pilgrimage to the grocery behind our office for coffee. I put on my black snow cap with the double insulation and adjusted my belt, which I now have to wear because o…

  • I fear I'm tanking on NaNoWriMo. I'm going to get some words done tonight, not nearly enough to catch me up. I was going to catch up this weekend (Sunday, specifically, because I'm going to Superset Tennis on Saturday an…

  • [zero] OK, it's like this: I'm not writing for NaNoWriMo tonight. Unless I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, which may or may not happen; it's anybody's guess these days. Also, the word …

  • Since some of you (okay, one of you) asked about the Singer-Songwriters concert (it's a concert, not a contest [not sure if I said contest or if a comment did, but that's how rumors get started, and I am most definitely …

  • 1,898 OK, so I was going to come home from tennis tonight and bang out a couple thousand more words, but I've got spaghetti legs and spaghetti brain. I was going to take tomorrow off from writing because I have tenni…

  • 2,264 It's after 1:00 and I need to get some sleep. I didn't make it to 26,000 today. I'm just short of 25,000, actually. Tomorrow's goal is to reach 28,000. Something good happened in the last hour of writing …

  • Update (because I'll do anything right now instead of working on my "novel") Mack and I went to the fabric store at around 11, and on the way there, Mack said she had a headache, but she seemed fine. While we were …

  • 2,342 This looks like a good total for yesterday, no? Well, it's a rather anemic total for the last two days because I wasn't able to post. Doesn't look so good now, does it? I've just been really tired. Work has…

  • 2,223 My goal was to reach 20,000, and I was so tired that when I made it, I stopped in mid-sentence. It reminded me of some writer (I forget who it was) who wrote for an exact amount of time every day. If he was in …

  • 573 I'm a little behind now, but I went to that writers' meeting and came home exhausted. I'm not so far behind I can't make it up. The meeting was good. I did eat about half a piece of pizza. The meeting was lon…

  • Looks like I need to clear up a misconception (and actually, none of you are stupid, I just never explained it, I guess): The word counts I'm posting daily are daily word counts. The cumulative total and other fun in…

  • 1,900 I was getting a little discouraged yesterday, thinking the only way I'd be able to get to 50,000 words would be to edit what I already have and expand on what's already there. I need to fill in a lot of detai…

  • 1,421 I'm really tired and I played about five hours of tennis today. I played well today, but I was tired when it was over. I don't even have anything to report other than I'm starting the Atkins diet tomorrow.

  • 1,585 Actually, I wrote 2,370 words today, but if you count the words that were lost that I had to make up for, I had a net total of 1,585. I also went to two soccer games and two soccer team parties. I took a …

  • -785 OK, so something bizarre happened. I lost the file for yesterday's 2116 words. I've looked all over for it, including my temp and backup. They are gone. I've done searches. So. I was trying to make up for ye…

  • 2,116 Man, did I have to work to pound out that many words! It's not like it's even that many. I think the problem is that when you're writing a lot of dialogue, you have a lot of pages, but probably not a lot of w…

  • 1,318 I was wondering why I felt so tired, and then I remembered: I woke up just before 5 this morning and didn't go back to sleep. I was very warm this morning--damn that heater. I'm really just barely keeping my eye…

  • 2,024 It felt like I wrote a lot, but I really had to struggle to get the first thousand words. I do have a tip for all of you who might be trying to get a little novel writing done at work (not that I advocate, condon…

  • 1,797 I'm falling asleep here, but it was a good day. I'm determined to finish the first draft this month. I'll do a real update when I'm not so tired.

  • 4,096 Dude, Writing a Novel is Hard! I already knew it was hard, actually. I was just kidding. Today went much better. I woke up at 5:30 this morning because I'd left the heater on too high, and I was sweating. I g…

  • 947 As I've mentioned here before in recent weeks, I'm doing the NaNoWriMo challenge. This involves writing a 50,000 word novel in one month. It started at midnight yesterday, and runs until midnight on November 30.…

  • She's a lightning victim. And she came home with a ton of candy.